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Monday, December 26, 2011

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 4: So Where Did They Go? “Resettlement” to the East (1). The Excruciatingly Slow Evolution of the Revisionist “Resettlement” Thesis.

Author: HC Guest Blogger

So Where Did They Go? “Resettlement”
to the East

The Excruciatingly Slow Evolution
of the Revisionist “Resettlement” Thesis

As with their fixation on
physical evidence (graves and gas chambers), the denier “hypothesis” of Nazi
resettlement of Jews through transit camps is a relatively recently phenomenon
as it underwent an excruciatingly slow evolution through Revisionist writings.
Arthur Butz was the first Revisionist to detail such an argument, writing in
1976 that instead of an extermination program, “the German policy was to
evacuate the Jews to the East.”[1] Butz
primarily drew this conclusion from the minutes of the Wannsee Conference[2], a few
wartime newspaper articles[3], and the
1943 document referencing Sobibor as a transit camp.[4] In
sketching out this supposed resettlement policy, Butz speculates that the
destinations of the deportees (whom he counts one million non-Polish Jews) were
stretched along a connected line in the occupied Soviet territories, including
areas such as Riga, Minsk, Ukraine, and the Sea of Azov.[5] The
ultimate fate of these deportees varied, according to Butz, but his work
suggests that the majority were either assimilated into the Soviet Union, or
emigrated to the United States and Israel.[6]

While Butz’s work proved to be popular among deniers, the
particular argument on resettlement appears to not have been well received,
judging by its omission from other Revisionist works during the 1970s and
1980s. Indeed, the major denier work to explain the fate of European Jews
during the war was by German-American Walter Sanning, who wrote The
Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry in 1983. Even in 2002, Mattogno wrote
that Sanning’s work was “the most comprehensive” Revisionist study regarding
Jewish population losses during the war.[7] Sanning
is also recommended as a source in Sobibór.[8]In
contrast to a supposed Nazi resettlement policy (which was ignored completely
in his work), Sanning used demographic arguments in order to state that Nazi
Germany never ruled enough Jews in order to kill six million. The chief target
of his analysis was Polish Jews, who were the primary victims of the death
camps, and hence, also the majority of the deportees in a resettlement
hypothesis. Sanning’s feeble attempts to arbitrarily lower the number of Polish
Jews under Nazi rule have already been refuted, so no extra comments on his
work are necessary.[9]
Such an effort by Sanning to reduce the number of Jews living in Nazi occupied
Europe is also reminiscent of similar efforts by Paul Rassinier, whose work The
Drama of European Jews originally appeared in 1964 and similarly ignored a
“resettlement” hypothesis.[10] Still,
the arguments by Sanning, particularly his claim that only some 757,000 Polish
Jews lived in the General Government[11], clash
with MGK’s belief that more than twice that number of Polish Jews was
resettled.

During the late 1980s, 1990s, and even the 2000s, the Revisionist
scene showed clear variations regarding the issue of resettlement, perhaps set
back by the strictly demographic argument of Rassinier and Sanning. This
manifested itself through levels of ambivalence and confusion in Revisionist
works. Some efforts during this time period reflect Sanning-type arguments to
show that Jewish populations remained in Europe, or were unharmed. Such was the
case with Rudolf and Graf’s reliance upon a February 1946 news report which
mistakenly added a zero to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s total of
Jews living in postwar Poland.[12] Indeed,
Sanning was held up in tandem with propositions of resettlement by both Rudolf
and Graf.[13]
For some Revisionists that accepted Jewish deportations to the occupied Eastern
territories, the issue of what actually happened to them following their
alleged arrival in the East was entirely elided, despite Butz’s suggestions.
One such example can be found in Mattogno’s two part essay on ‘The Myth of the
Extermination of the Jews’ in the late 1980s, where deportations are briefly
discussed, largely based on the Korherr report, but nothing is stated over the
deportees’ eventual fate.[14]

Confusion over the fate of the deported Jews remained
even after more detailed arguments for “resettlement” appeared. In 1990,
Steffen Werner published a book theorizing that the Third Reich had deported millions
of Jews (a set figure is not clear in the work) into Belorussia, and that those
Jews were still held captive by the Soviet government at the time of his
writing.[15]
As Werner makes clear, his argument is entirely based upon “circumstantial
evidence,” and very weakly at that.[16] In
1993, although Graf wrote that Werner’s book had to be used “with caution,”
overall he supported the thesis of Jews being transported and left in the
occupied Soviet territories, simply noting that numerous unanswered questions
about the fate of the missing Jews existed.[17]
Werner’s thesis has not been officially supported by leading Revisionist
writers, but instead has been used as a “first step” of research into the
subject of resettlement.

In the early 1990s, some arguments of resettlement were
focused directly upon the Aktion Reinhard camps, specifically Treblinka (which
was also included by Werner).[18] In 1990
Udo Walendy published an article arguing that a transit camp (Malkinia) existed
just a few miles north of the Treblinka death camp, and that deportees actually
arrived in the Malkinia transit camp to be deported to the East (not
Treblinka).[19]
Over time Walendy’s Malkinia gambit has been picked up by some deniers,[20]
including Mattogno and Graf,[21] but not
all (such as Kues).[22] Another
article from the same period (1992) by Mark Weber and Andrew Allen utilized
some of Walendy’s arguments to support their view that Treblinka was a “transit
camp.”[23] Weber
and Allen used “mainstream” sources (historians and court judgments) to show that
some Jews deported to Treblinka were selected and transferred to other
concentration camps. The duo also cited letters and postcards from Jews
deported from the Warsaw ghetto to settlements in the occupied Soviet
territories (presumably transported through Treblinka, according to Weber and
Allen).[24]

More detailed argumentation was offered for the
resettlement “hypothesis” in the early/mid 1990s by Enrique Aynat and
Jean-Marie Boisdefeu.[25] Both
authors largely relied upon wartime news reports in order to support their
notions that Jews were transported en masse to the East through the
extermination camps. Boisdefeu plainly admitted that documents were severely
lacking to support such a resettlement program (hence he declares it a
“hypothesis”) and recognized that news reports were all that was available.[26] Many of
the contemporary and clandestine sources of evidence that these deniers used
were later employed by MGK in their works (both with and without proper
reference), as directly admitted in the praise for the two “undaunted
revisionist researchers” offered in Sobibór.[27] Aynat
and Boisdefeu both found areas of eastern Poland and the western USSR
(particularly Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic) to be the likely resettlement
destinations. Boisdefeu also theorized that western Jews were forcefully
deported by the Soviets after the war into Siberia for labor.[28]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, no doubt inspired by a
sense of optimism from the work of Aynat and Boisdefeu, there was a resurgence
of interest among Revisionists in the fate of Jews deported to the Nazi
extermination camps. In 1999, Jürgen Graf published a piece on the fate of
unregistered Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz in 1944.[29] After
citing, from Boisdefeu and Aynat, several of the wartime news reports
referencing European Jews in the occupied Soviet territories (which Graf calls
“all the same” as wartime German documents in support of a resettlement
thesis), a documented May 1944 transport of French Jews to the Baltic
containing children, as well as falsely interpreting a handful of German
documents,[30]
Graf proclaims that “almost certainly” Auschwitz and the Reinhard camps served
as transit camps to deport Jews into the occupied Eastern territories. Graf
also used the argument of Weber and Allen, citing the transfer of a few hundred
laborers from Treblinka to concentration camps (i.e., Majdanek) as proof of its
transit purpose. To explain the ultimate fate of these deportees, Graf suggests
that Polish Jews voluntarily stayed in the Soviet Union and approvingly
references Werner and Boisdefeu’s speculation that Jews from Western Europe
were rounded up and deported to Siberian labor camps by the Soviets after the
war. Graf recognized though that without proper documentation, such a far-fetched
scenario would only remain a “thesis.”

Graf’s
brief summary of the Revisionist arguments for resettlement would set the tone
for the works he co-authored on the Reinhard camps during the 2000s with Carlo
Mattogno and Thomas Kues, wherein most of the points offered in support of an
alternative function to the camps were unoriginal in Revisionist literature.
While some Revisionists still quibble with addressing the resettlement issue
and the ultimate fate of Jews under Nazi occupation,[31] the
important step that MGK have taken in their books and articles is to spend
substantial time addressing such issues in connection with more
negationist-type arguments.[32] Such
efforts can be viewed as a part of Mattogno’s push for a new “affirmationist” Revisionism.[33] Of
course, the fact that MGK have given the issue more prominence than others should
not be taken to mean that their arguments are valid or truthful, as the reader
shall quickly see.

[3] Most of the ones Butz cites (p.260 n.371) are dated from 1941 and
early 1942, no doubt related to the deportation of German Jews.

[4] Himmler an Pohl, 5.7.43, NO-482. As was noted in Chapter 2, this is
an irrelevancy because, for example, Soldau had previously been referred to as
a “transit camp” but was also a gassing site.

[5] Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p.267. Butz is
unclear on the total figure of Jewish deportees for his resettlement program,
excluding Polish Jews from his count due to their alleged similarity with
Soviet Jews, as well as pre-1941 deportations and evacuations.

[12] The Committee’s report reported 80,000 Jews left in Poland. Graf
and Rudolf cite the news article’s figure of 800,000. ‘Appendix II: European
Jewry-Position in Various Countries,’ Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry:
Report to the United States Government and His Majesty’s Government in the
United Kingdom, 1946; Graf, Giant, p. 110; Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting
the Holocaust, 2nd revised edition, Chicago: Theses &
Dissertations, 2003, ‘Holocaust Victims: A Statistical Analysis: W. Benz and
W.N. Sanning’, p.195.

[24] These postcards are also discussed by Kues in ‘Evidence for the
Presence of “Gassed” Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories: Part II’, Inconvenient
History, 2/4, 2010. In both cases, the deniers show gullibility and excessive
credulity towards the provenance of a dubious source that suits their
arguments.

[29] Jürgen Graf, ‘Insights on the 1944 Deportations of Hungarian Jews:
What Happened to the Jews Who Were Deported to Auschwitz But Were Not
Registered There?’ Journal of Historical Review, 19/4, 2000:

[30] Graf’s reliance on the few documents also comes as he feels
“convinced” that the Allies destroyed Nazi documents related to resettlement.

[31] Wilfried Heink, ‘Well, where are they then?’ Inconvenient
History Blog, May 31, 2010, http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/05/well-where-are-they-then/.
Thomas Kues also justified such hesitancy over the issue, stating that
revisionists are not under a “moral obligation” to address such an issue. See his
first section in his ‘Evidence for the Presence of “Gassed” Jews in the
Occupied Eastern Territories’: Part 1, Inconvenient History, 2/2, Part 2
Inconvenient History, 2/4, 2010.

[33] Mattogno uses such a term to describe his recent works on the
Auschwitz camp. Of course, serious history (as opposed to pseudohistory) needs
no such designation, as detailing actual events already forms the basis of it.